Posts by artbooks

Mark Catesby’s Illuminated Natural History

“It is now so warm that I am in only my Shirt and the Frogs are in full Tune.” —Mark Catesby in South Carolina and the Caribbean, 1722-26 Henrietta McBurney– The English naturalist Mark Catesby (1683-1749) wrote to his sponsor the botanist, William Sherard, about the extreme weather conditions in

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Ep. 83 – A Conversation About American Artist Joseph E. Yoakum

In this episode of the Yale University Press podcast, we talk about the life and drawings of the self-taught artist Joseph E. Yoakum with the Art Institute of Chicago‘s Mark Pascale and MoMA‘s Esther Adler, two of the curators of the current traveling retrospective exhibition of the artist’s work and

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Travel, Photography, and the (Familiar) New

Monica Bravo– After a long period of staying at home, social distancing, and masking up, we are told—at last—that the world is opening up. Breathing a collective sigh of relief (one that still does not extend to every community worldwide, I hasten to add), many are rushing to once again

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Arthur Dove and Nature

As writers began defining the vernacular aspects of American art in mid-1910s, the photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz and his circle became a locus of attention. Two younger writers, Waldo Frank and Paul Rosenfeld, both neo-Freudians, were among those responsible for redirecting the interpretation of modernist expression. Frank and Rosenfeld

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On the Viewing Platform: The Panorama and its Afterlives

Katie Trumpener– “Panoramas”, gigantic paintings in the round, were first created and exhibited in Britain in 1792. Rapidly taken up across Europe, then around the world, they remained a central nineteenth-century art form–and an equally crucial (if sometimes spectral) force in twentieth-century visual culture. Indeed, the recent book On the

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Metro Pictures, Gallery of the Pictures Generation, Calls it Quits

Andy Grundberg– The announcement that Metro Pictures will close its gallery in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York at the end of the year emphatically signals – if any emphasis were needed – the end of an era of contemporary art. One could call it Postmodernism’s swan song, but it’s

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Ep. 82 – How Photography Became Contemporary Art

As Michael S. Roth wrote in his review in The Washington Post, “The maturation of Grundberg as a renowned critic coincides with the maturation of photography as an art form and its conquest of the art market. With this fine book, he has given us a personal yet balanced account

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Ep. 81 – Alice Neel’s Deep Humanism

In a fascinating conversation that ranges from Alice Neel’s politics to her painting practice, we talk with Kelly Baum and Randall Griffey, the co-curators of the current exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and co-editors of the related catalogue, Alice Neel: People Come First. YaleUniversity · Alice Neel's Deep

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Changeability for Survival: Sanford Biggers’s Codeswitch

Interview with the artist by David Ebony Sanford Biggers is a multifaceted, multi-talented artist with a singular, global vision. A major touring museum solo of works by the Los Angeles-born (1970), New York-based artist, Codeswitch features some sixty large-scale “quilt paintings,” as well as a number of relief constructions, and videos. Scheduled to

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A Personal Canon: Jennifer A. Pruitt on Five Influential Texts

In my work, I strive to understand how diverse populations of people used and experienced architecture in the medieval Islamic world. The texts I have chosen for my personal canon explore these cultural interactions, bringing the complexity of medieval humanity to life. The Cairo Geniza The Cairo Geniza, which is

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